by About the author: My name is Raquel Bryant. I just completed my first year of graduate school at UMass Amherst with my advisor Mark Leckie, who is also sailing with us on this expedition. I am a micropaleontologist/paleoceanographer interested in Cretaceous climate and I am so excited for STEMSEAS!
Our first day on the ship! We spent the afternoon in safety training which included a rundown of what to do in case of an emergency like a fire, man-over-board, or if the ship is sinking, which we hope none of will happen. On the lighter side we all practiced getting into our survival suits! See the hilarious photos at Facebook.com/STEMSEAS.
Later, we learned about the two instruments we will be using to take measurements while at sea from the MarTech Croy and the coring engineer Chris. We will be deploying a CTD to measure water conditions like conductivity, temperature, dissolved oxygen level and salinity and we will be taking two gravity cores. This resulted in the first assignment for the students, a math problem: If the wire rate is 60 meters per minute, how long will it take to deploy and recover both the core and CTD sequentially (can’t have two wires in the water at once) at two sites? The first site is at about 1000 meters water depth whereas the second site is at 4500 meters water depth. Hopefully the students come up with times that fit into our allotted 18 hours for stopping.
To get the students thinking like scientists we did an exercise with checks. Each group picked random checks or ‘evidence’ from an envelope and tried to piece together the story they represented. Later the groups collaborated to see what they could learn from each other’s records. In the end we learned about assumptions, making and substantiated inferences and multiple working hypotheses.
I expected to be super busy today and I was! Grabbing last minute supplies and organizing the main lab, but we have successfully started to turn the Oceanus into our new home. Today I learned that not only are all of the students very excited to set sail, they all are a little nervous about getting seasick, definitely a concern I share! Everyone is heading to bed early to prepare for our early morning departure! Check out the livestream of our departure at Facebook.com/STEMSEAS
